Afghan Deaths Highlight Lack of Tracking Tech

At about 4 a.m. Wednesday, NATO warplanes dropped precision-guided munitions on a band of Afghans who seemed like militants in the provincial district of Andor. Instead, the bombs hit a unit of Afghan soldiers. Now, at least five of the soldiers are dead. And if early indications are right, the tragedy was utterly preventable; all NATO had to do was give their Afghan allies a few pieces of simple gear.

An incident team is on the ground as of this writing to assess what actually happened. But a NATO spokesman, Josef Blotz, offered this preliminary explanation: “The reason for this is perhaps a coordination issue…. We were obviously not absolutely clear whether there were Afghan national security forces in the area.”

Technology has largely resolved these miscommunications among the United States and its NATO allies. All kinds of tools are now used to prevent so-called “friendly fire” incidents — from simple reflective tags to GPS beacons and digital maps. But NATO apparently doesn’t trust its Afghan allies with the tech. There’s “a very real issue with illiteracy” among Afghan soldiers, a NATO officer tells Danger Room, making it doubtful that they’d be able to manage or maintain “sensitive technical equipment.”

Of course, anyone with a cellphone these days has gear this complicated. (That’s how Google Maps knows where to steer you.) The idea is the same in the military: Give your unit a GPS device, and the Eyes in the Sky that talk to air support will know that the mysterious band of guys with guns beneath them creeping in formation toward a target is actually a friendly unit.

It’s called Blue Force Tracking (because blue forces = the good guys in military lingo), and it’s simple, straightforward, real-time geolocation. (Well, provided your network data speed is decent.) General David Petraeus praised it to the heavens to Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman a few years ago.

But the Afghan friendlies don’t currently show up on the grid. According to Lt. Col. Joseph T. Breasseale, another spokesman for NATO troops, that Afghan soldiers and police “are not issued ‘blue-force trackers’ or equipment of that nature, typically.” Despite this “terribly regrettable” incident, Breasseale continued, “we work tirelessly to coordinate and synchronize our operations.”

Maybe it’s time. Blue Force Trackers have been amped up recently as the Army has cottoned to their utility. Last month, Satellite Today reports, the service’s Communications Electronics Command released $6.1 million to the Maryland company Comtech Mobile Datacom in order to get Blue Force Tracker production and the satellite bandwidth to support it out to tactical units. That’s part of a $384 million contract for getting the next-gen Blue Force Tracker into the field, something company materials on its website pegged would happen by this spring.

Blue Force Tracker isn’t the only geolocation tool at the military’s disposal. A post-Desert Storm push to make sure aviators stop accidentally blowing up their soldier comrades below has resulted in all kinds of gear. LEDs powered by the 9-volt batteries anyone can buy off the shelf can power up an infrared beacon visible to pilots’ night vision. Indeed, al-Qaeda suspects that’s how CIA drones are tracking them. Don’t like that? Carry around a transponder the size of a bar of soap that acts as a digital dog tag when talking a plane’s radio system.

Sure, there are issues with giving Afghans access to geolocation tech. On top of the literacy issue, it could get expensive. But there are cheap, simple methods to prevent friendly fire. U.S. troops wear infrared-reflective patches on their uniforms as a quick way to identify themselves as “blue.” The Afghan National Army may not have the those patches. (And a single insignia may not have prevented Wednesday’s tragedy.) But, as the Washington Times‘ Eli Lake reported last year, some of them have ended up on the backs of Taliban fighters.

All of which is fair enough. But Comtech’s description of how Blue Force Tracker works makes it look like all you need to do is put a transponder in your truck and tune in the right signal, to say nothing of the lower-tech options for geolocation.

An Army Reserve captain just back from Afghanistan recently told NPR that the most important thing he did during the war was to abandon the condescending belief that his Afghan soldier counterparts couldn’t handle basic computers. Anyone who’s hung around an Afghan National Army unit has been interrupted by the trill of the multiple cellphones in troops’ pouches.

Blue Force Tracker booster Petraeus is now in command in Afghanistan, of course. A big part of his command mantra so far has been to pledge “unity of effort” — not just across the U.S. government and the NATO coalition, but with the Afghans, as well. “This is not the first time this has happened, but we hope this would be the last one,” a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense told the New York Times. Getting Afghan soldiers on the same grid that U.S. troops use might be an early test of Petraeus’ desired unity.